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After the bloodbath at Azami Elementary and a week spent in Udou’s not so tender care, Tatsuki’s pleased (in his admittedly taciturn way) just to be home again. It takes a while to regain his strength but he and Kotarou sort out the shopping and household chores between them with some help from their aunties, and there’s enough money coming in from the estate and their parents to see them though high school without starving. By the hundredth day after Grampa’s death, Tatsuki and Kotarou are friends again, and by the first anniversary they’re family; sometimes Tatsuki looks about their quiet, tidy home and feels almost happy. The sight of Grampa poking about the kitchen cupboards or pottering in the garden is bittersweet but an afterimage of the two of them glued to a Le Mans telecast reminds Tatsuki how much his grandfather used to love the Honda, and he starts saving toward a new bike. He tells Kotarou hesitantly, uncertain of his reaction, but Kotarou just nods and starts bringing home Vibes magazines from the convenience store, and they pretend to ogle the covergirls even though Kotarou is red-faced and Tatsuki indifferent (to both the girls and the Harleys).
On the whole Kotarou is calmer, less prone to stampeding into harm’s way. He hasn’t lost any of his crime-fighting instincts, but the kidnappings and grievous bodily harm seem to have taught him a degree of caution. He is watchful of Tatsuki, alert for the telltale indications of trouble but quick to suggest alternative means of engagement even if it means something so radical as calling the police. There are no broken bones and no ransom demands, and Tatsuki finds he can take pleasure in the care of his cousin again now that that care is something as simple and sweetly domestic as sewing on a shirt button or making omurice. When Yuuto teases them about being newlyweds Tatsuki has a tough time dredging up a scowl.
Tatsuki’s absorption in his cousin is such that he doesn’t need to see Yuuto’s worried expression one morning in class to know that beneath the customary sunshine smile, Kotarou’s aura has turned to shit.
Tatsuki should know better than to trust Udou and Kiba. Those so-called “supernatural angels on standby” -- and what a pretentious load of bull that is, Tatsuki twitches every time he logs onto the forum -- they might talk a good game, but they don’t get just how stubborn Kotarou can be. Everyone assumes Tatsuki is the pigheaded one in the family, but your average pig has nothing on Kotarou’s mulishness. Naturally the amnesia doesn’t stick.
Psychic powers aren’t exactly requisite to detect the resulting nosedive of Kotarou’s mood but most of their classmates attribute it to the missing Mio, who’s well into her year-long exchange to New Zealand by now, and they tease Kotarou accordingly. Tatsuki, who has been an unwitting witness to their amiable and entirely unromantic email correspondence no thanks to his possession of the household’s sole computer and a vast measure of psychometric skill, knows better.
No, Kotarou’s ashen complexion and hitching breath, the compulsive swipe across his face at blood that’s no longer there, the anxious dart of his horrified eyes towards Tatsuki and then the sick, sad slide away: they tell Tatsuki without words that Kotarou’s brain has performed an all too successful reboot. Kotarou covers quickly, returning his attention to school matters, and Tatsuki’s initial, shamed reaction, once he understands that everything’s out in the open now -- that the biggest bombshell had detonated much like the back of Tatsuki’s skull -- is relief. He really doesn’t like keeping secrets from his cousin anymore; it feels wrong to withhold the truth from Kotarou, who poured everything he had into Tatsuki just to save the miserable life Tatsuki had been so ready to throw away. Before all the shit with Yukisato went down it had been much easier to close himself off from Kotarou. But Kotarou had shoved more than just power into him back then; Tatsuki had ended up mainlining Kotarou himself.
Tatsuki has often had cause to wonder whether he’d bled right back into Kotarou. After their sojourn with the angel boys, Kotarou had shot up almost overnight until he and Tatsuki were eye to eye, just like when they were kids. And lately Kotarou’s hair is actually obeying the dictates of gel for the first time in his life even as Tatsuki is letting his own hair grow wild and inviting --and Tatsuki’s not too embarrassed to admit to himself at least that he wants Kotarou’s touch, craves it like never before. He’s skin hungry all over, all the time.
But right now there’s something more of the old Tatsuki in Kotarou’s posture, something rigid and unwelcome, and Tatsuki’s relief melts away. They both know he took too much from Kotarou, far more than Kotarou could afford.
The school week passes slowly and Yuuto looks grimmer by the day, but there’s no eruption from Kotarou, nothing to tell Tatsuki if Kotarou despises him (which would be bad) or hates himself (infinitely worse). Tatsuki’s lost the knack of hatred -- it’s difficult to remember the taste of it since being washed in Kotarou’s peculiar brilliance -- but he worries that his own homeless bitterness has slithered inside Kotarou somehow, where it doesn’t belong. Kotarou’s quiet in class, listless at basketball practice and spends over-long hours at work, and Tatsuki can find only the traces Kotarou leaves behind him in the home they share. He studies Kotarou’s empty bed each morning for signs of rest, but Kotarou’s nights appear fretful and desolate.
By week’s end, Tatsuki’s head aches and his stomach feels permanently knotted with anxiety; he is smoothing a new poster of Sébastien Charpentier across his increasingly cluttered bedroom wall (and resolutely ignoring the fourteen frantic messages Yuuto has left on his cell) when it occurs to him that Kotarou has stripped his own room of all its basketball paraphernalia, that Kotarou’s walls are now as bare as Tatsuki’s once were. The Honda poster was accompanied in the mail by a huge Bulls banner for Kotarou -- her Chicago exile has turned Tatsuki’s mother into a hopeless basketball tragic -- and Kotarou simply wrote a polite note of thanks before pushing the banner under his bed with all the other stuff. Tatsuki knows, because he was watching.
He is always watching.
It honestly can’t be helped, and Tatsuki needs the inadvertent intimacy like oxygen. Tatsuki is as desperate to see Kotarou as Kotarou is now evasive, so the shadows of Kotarou’s every act slide through Tatsuki’s vision even as the real Kotarou shuts himself away. It’s not as if the touch of Kotarou’s hand is needed to amplify the power anymore; nowadays, Tatsuki is completely and irrevocably suffused with Kotarou’s very essence. Kotarou cannot absent himself from Tatsuki even when he so desperately tries; Tatsuki passes Kotarou’s remains at all hours of the day. He sluices Kotarou’s thin arms as they share a stool in the bathroom, he kneels with Kotarou before the household altar, and he fills Kotarou’s bowl with miso every morning, feeding Kotarou’s hungry mouth and grumbling belly, but not once do they meet and always they remain alone. It doesn’t matter that Tatsuki can stand in the Konan High bleachers and watch twenty games of basketball at once -- Kotarou passing to Minami, Kotarou tempting a foul, Kotarou getting to the line, Kotarou sulking on the bench -- when all the while the real Kotarou, the Kotarou of Tatsuki’s now, is somewhere else, at the library or in Shibuya or at work at the convenience store, but anywhere that Tatsuki is not, not yet.
So he waits impatiently in the kitchen until he hears the distant rattle of Kotarou’s key in the front door; it’s the only announcement he gets now that their honeymoon is over. Kotarou doesn’t stop for food but heads straight up to his room, so Tatsuki makes a pot of tea and peels a satsuma to take up to him. Kotarou doesn’t answer his knock but Tatsuki walks in regardless, because it’s the sort of thing Kotaoru himself would have done.
There are many shades of Kotarou moving about the room. Some sit at an untidy desk tearing their hair out over their English homework; some lie on the floor flipping through piles of Dunk magazines. Some of them kiss Mio, some more of them laugh with Yuuto, and one of them crouches on the floor to comfort a weeping Koutari. Many of them storm back and forth across the room cursing Tatsuki’s name, and many more of them whisper it softly, Tak-kun, beneath the shaking bedclothes.
The only Kotarou Tatsuki cares about is the one sprawled belly down on his bed, silent and still beneath the penguin triptych Grampa put up when Kotarou was five and had trouble sleeping in a strange place. Kotarou’s legs have grown so long that his feet hang over the end now; Tatsuki nudges them aside until there’s space for him to sit and say, “Hey.”
There’s no response from Kotarou, but Tatsuki doesn’t exactly expect one; Kotarou learned to mope from the best. “You know, there’s really only room enough for one broody guy in this house, don’t you think? If I can’t pull it off anymore, what makes you think you can?”
“Go away.” The pillow muffles Kotarou's voice, but the sentiment is clear.
“Yeah, that always worked so well for me, huh?” says Tatsuki, thinking of all the pestering he used to endure from Kotarou. He misses it. “The guys needed you at the game this afternoon. You know they can’t score without their star player on court. Where were you?”
Kotarou’s head turns toward the window, away from Tatsuki. ”Nowhere important. I’m surprised you didn’t follow me.”
Tatsuki had wanted to. “I trust you,” he says instead.
It’s the wrong thing to say. Kotarou buries his face in the pillow again, so Tatsuki almost can’t hear his soft words: “I don’t.”
“Who, me or you?” says Tatsuki flat out, because the thought of trust broken between them makes his lungs seize, and he has to know what’s going on in Kotarou’s head. It kills him that he can see Kotarou’s every move but be so blind to his every thought. “Are you pissed at me? Is that what this is all about? You’re pissed because I didn’t tell you what happened? Are you mad I sucked up all your power and left you dry? Because I didn’t ask for it, you know. I didn’t when we were little, and I sure as hell didn’t now. You gave it all away, the whole lot, and no one asked you to. No one thought you would.” Kotarou’s fists are clenched beneath the pillow, wrapping it against his ears to shut Tatsuki out, but Tatsuki can’t stop. “I didn’t ask for it, didn’t want it. I didn’t know I needed it. And I didn’t know what it would do to you either.”
Tatsuki’s hands are starting to shake. He puts his tray down on the floor beside the bed before he drops it, and then he whispers, “Maybe you’re mad because you killed me and I didn’t stay dead.” It’s an awful thing to say out loud, and a worse thought to harbor in his heart. He doesn’t realize how much he needs to lance it until he sees Kotarou’s entire body stiffen in unmistakable denial. “You killed me.”
Kotarou lets out a horrible, strangled keen that chills Tatsuki’s backbone, and he can’t stand it anymore, the distance between their skin. “Turn over,” he says, and when Kotarou ignores him, playing dead, Tatsuki wrestles him over onto his back, sweating and swearing until he straddles Kotarou’s waist. Kotarou glares up at him sullenly, but it doesn’t suit him; for all he’s grown, he’s still adorable in his flushed face and rumpled clothes. Tatsuki takes his own shirt between his hands and starts unfastening the buttons, pulling the plackets apart. “Look at me,” he says, panting. “You killed me and then you made it all better, made it more than better.”
“I killed you,” says Kotarou slowly, deliberately.
“And you made it all better,” says Tatsuki again. He reaches for Kotarou’s hands to draw them to his chest, wanting Kotarou to feel the beating heart of him, but Kotarou pulls free in stubborn refusal, turning his gaze from Tatsuki’s imploring eyes and his outstretched fingers. “Hey, did you forget what you said to Koutari that night he stayed over?” Tatsuki revisits the old scene, repeating Kotarou’s words carefully after him: “You can’t blame anyone for a tragedy. They’re nobody’s fault.”
“Stop spying on me!” says Kotarou, bucking between Tatsuki’s thighs like a coughing bike.
“I can’t help it,” says Tatsuki, “and it’s nobody’s fault.” He’s almost starting to believe it himself.
Kotarou sighs and stills. “I know that. Just don’t hold out on me anymore, okay? I’m not a baby. You don’t have to protect me, even from the big stuff.”
“And - and the other stuff?”
Kotarou doesn’t bother pretending he doesn’t know what Tatsuki’s getting at, what they’ve been dancing around too long. “Yeah, that stuff either,” he says softly, biting his lower lip. He raises his hands, painfully hesitant, until his fingertips skim Tatsuki’s belt, and when Tatsuki sucks in a harsh breath, Kotarou presses his warm palms against Tatsuki’s bare, quivering skin until they both gasp at the delicious shock of it.
Tatsuki’s head falls back and his eyes drift closed, shutting out all Kotarous except the one beneath him, with him, until he’s riding blind. His fingers find their unerring way to Kotarou’s skin; he peels Kotarou’s t-shirt up and over his head and then Kotarou pulls him down, and they wriggle and grin until their hearts nestle close and their mouths meet in wonder.
Kotarou soon complains that Tatsuki’s too heavy and Tatsuki calls Kotarou a brat but he leans back anyway to give him his breath back. The tea’s gone cold but Tatsuki slips satsuma segments between Kotarou’s lips and feeds him back some of the power he gave away, and when Kotarou nips Tatsuki’s finger he’s able to lick it better.
And when Yuuto drops by the next morning in a state, Kotarou’s glowing gold aura speaks for both of them.